I’ve been singularly unsuccessful in getting through my reading list. A number of stops and starts. Not much to shout about.

Concentration has been at a premium; it’s span getting shorter and shorter all the time. Train rides have been spent with podcasts or simply looking out at the country side.Bedtime now involves being tucked up not with a paperback, but with a copy of private eye or the economist or the LRB. Time spent alone between meetings is more time spent with a screen and that obvious, endless race to scroll to the bottom of the inbox.

A lunchtime wander round the local Waterstones recently led me to George Monbiot’s Feral.

Its cover is handsome: adorned with the striking image of a Stag in a multi-story car park and a combination of Albertus and Gill-Sans typefaces. Books about nature are not my usual cup of tea. But, attracted by a combination of the aforementioned cover and Monbiot’s work for The Guardian, I decided to give it a go.

The central idea of Feral is the notion of rewilding. Monbiot describes rewilding as permitting ecological processes to resume “(recognising) that nature consists not just of a collection of species but also of their ever shifting relationships with each other and with the physical environment” (Monbiot, 2014, p. 8). It is a process aimed at the “mass restoration of eco-systems”.

Monbiot’s TED talk on the subject is well worth a watch and it explains many of the concepts in the book.

His desire to see this process happen stems from his personal feeling of “ecological boredom”. A sense that modern life, with all its safety, was missing something. For the majority of people in the developed world, we are lucky enough to lead secure lives. But with security comes a sedentary existence. It occurred to me that this observation is not just true of our personal lives, but also for our professional lives – my professional life specifically and not only to me, but also to my entire profession, really.

Monbiot discusses an ecological phenomenon called trophic cascades, a phenomenon which is promoted by rewilding. Trophic cascades are “processes caused by animals at the top of the food chain, which tumble all the way to the bottom. Predators and large herbivores can transform places, which they live. In some cases they have changed not only the ecosystem but also the nature of the soil, the behaviour of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans and even the composition of the atmosphere” (Monbiot, p. 9).

I believe we need to rewild creativity in the advertising and communication industry.

Modern agencies, whilst offering a range of services, notionally specialise in a single, over-arching discipline. We have agencies that offer Advertising, Media, Direct, Digital and PR and they resource themselves accordingly. They are monolithic, mono-cultural even. To use Monbiot’s phrase, they are ecologically boring.

The corporate equivalent of rewilding in the communications industry is a return to a type of full service agency – of breaking down the agency silos that have crept up over time and restoring the creative ecology. The analogue of the trophic cascades in nature, when played out in agencies is a world in which all sorts of people, from all sorts of disciplines begin to interact more closely with each other again. The legacy ‘species’ of copy writers, art directors, media and account planners, suits, PR and direct specialists, not just all under one roof again, but back round the same table, actually in the same room. Not just for meetings, but all the time. What would happen then? What would the work produced look like in this situation? That’s before you introduce the nascent ‘species’ –people specialising in disciplines that have emerged since the dissolution of full service agencies: UX, social, data planners and analysts, app and web and product design.

As we are constantly being reminded, the world for brands and advertisers is only getting more and more complex. With this complexity, the world becomes harder to navigate. The natural fault lines between communications disciplines is blurring as a part of this shift and becoming harder to discern: the need for closer collaboration therefore is heightened and exaggerated. Complex brand challenges need closer working relationships, not more distant ones. Jeremy Bullmore, writing in 2002 to mark the fortieth birthday of D&AD noted “at exactly the time that the value of communications consistency and brand coherence has never been more widely recognized…the suppliers of those communications have become irrevocably splintered” (Bullmore, 2002, p. 467). The world has only got more complex since he wrote those words. This is the prevailing and most prominent, obvious even, reason for going back to a full service model.

But, something else is happening in the agency ecology. Something that means we must rewild our industry eco-system now.

Nearly ten years ago, when I started working in the industry at a media planning and buying agency the days of the full service agency where still talked about with a mix of reverie and disdain, depending on whom you spoke to. Media planners in the latter camp would regale you with stories of their work being confined to “five slides at the back”; if indeed their work was seen by the client at all. Planners in the former – far from seeing media planning as the bit bolted on at the end of the main body of work, saw things like Phil Georgiadis who has talked about media strategy during this time as being fundamentally a “creative problem” (Georgiadis, 2014) requiring and benefitting from input from all types of people. In his case, WCRS chairman Robin Wight.

The graduates my current agency have just welcomed into the building will have no concept of what it was like when we all worked together under one roof. More importantly, their managers – the people who have graduated to senior management roles in 2015 – will have only experienced it second hand themselves. The last vestiges of people who were actually around for the full service days are either retiring or moving into new pastures: international roles, chairmanship or that Cornish B&B they always fancied running. With them go vital knowledge, experience and emotional intelligence.

Monbiot sees rewilding as a form of conservation, as should the advertising industry in my opinion. We must conserve the skills that make for mutually beneficial co-operation and collaboration between disciplines. How many media planners working today know how a planner will brief work in an advertising agency? Not notionally, but actually know? How many creative teams will genuinely have the expertise to take ideas from concept to the context in which they will finally live and be consumed by our client’s target audiences other than on TV – and even then really understand the method and means in which the ad will be distributed? Greater proximity will breed greater understanding, greater competition even – driving the product we sell our clients forward.

Interestingly, the barriers to rewilding nature are probably the same that prevent us from rewilding the agency landscape in advertising. Monbiot observes time and again that the barriers to rewilding our landscape “are cultural and economic” (Monbiot, p. 106), rather than ecological. So it is with our industry. The full service model fell apart because of ego, it has been said. But it has stayed apart because of money. Adam Smith’s notion that “the ultimate source of increase in wealth lies in the increase in productivity through greater division of labour” (Chang, 2014, p. 31) has been proven correct in the agency landscape. Division of duty in the post full service world has created wealth for specialists as well as a chance to “at last enjoy the prominence and rewards they’d been previously denied” (Bullmore) in the old agency world.

Ultimately though – the biggest handbrake on anyone attempting to start a modern, full service business is the customer, our clients. It is a truth in business that it is a “company’s customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do” (Christensen, 1997, p. 101). A full service business launched today would fail not necessarily because it is a bad idea, but because no one would be prepared to pay the relative price premium it would have to charge to survive. The current trend for agency fees is downward, after all, not upward. In reality, this could be a case of cutting one’s nose off to spite your face. I’m increasingly convinced that the quality of thinking and output that a modern full service business could offer a client would more than warrant the cost difference of a diversified supplier and agency roster.

The answer probably doesn’t lie in a return to the old style of full service agency. They worked in a different time and context to the one we find ourselves in now. Maybe the answer lies in the holding company; itself a modern phenomenon, and the strategy adopted by companies such as WPP or Havas placing complimentary agency brands in adjoining offices. Maybe the answer lies in virtual networks like Pimento or Victor and Spoils, companies that could offer clients a new style of agency; one that acts as a meta agent for clients – sourcing and assembling the best team for any job in a fluid manner, itself becoming more involved in the procurement of services than the strict production of work. Whatever the answer, it will have to involve a more diverse and less “ecologically boring” creative landscape.

…the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History”, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic

History is at the centre of Roth’s The Plot Against America. This quote jumped off the page at me as I read on the way to work this morning. Clever git. I wish I could write like that.

I’ve been very slack on the blogging front in the last couple of months.

No time for writing. Or, more accurately, no time for thinking. Trying to find space and time to thinkabout what to write has been the challenge this year.

The desire to write has been significant. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself sat in front of either a blank word document or a blank WordPress console. Sat with nothing to write.

Time for reading has been slim too.

Paucity of time has been compounded by some bad choices on the book front, sapping momentum from what was a fairly prolific start to the year.

I seem to have found salvation in the form of The Remains of the Day by Kezuo Ishiguro. It’s a gentle novel. A nice change from the corse prose of an Amis or a Welsh or a Niven.

I am sure that this is the most pedestrian and prosaic of readings – but the thing i’ve been most taken with is the focus of the story on transition. It is an obvious observation perhaps, given the novel’s title.

We meet our character as he approaches the twilight of his career. We see an England that is falling from the grasp of the previous generation’s nobility and into the hand’s of wealthy industrialists. New Owners. New Money. Set between the first and second world war, an even bigger shift in the global stage is about to occur.

I don’t know why I’ve been so captivated by these themes. Transition and change are everywhere in modern storytelling. But, something about the stories use of a distinct change in ownership seems especially pertinent to me, today – living in London. London is in flux. Money is flooding in to the capital. Pubs in hitherto unfashionable areas of London are being taken over and converted by estate agents, those most loathsome standard-bearers of the capitalist mission. Where their liveried fleet of vehicles go, money inevitably follows, and so with it goes a little bit of the soul of a place. A soul which has made London so so vital and vibrant.

Like Ishaguro’s England, the change is being driven by new money. But today we also have a new government too, one whose recent election promises are now manifesting themselves in startling technicolour. People aren’t happy about it. For whilst the capital booms, the rest of the country that is outside of the M25 seems to continue to stutter and those most in need of help from society see less and less support. Change is everywhere, some of it good, some of it not so.

Not many other forms of culture force the mind in such a vivid way. It’s an important quality that literature possesses. Something about the way we engage with a book or story, not quite part of it, but still not quite removed. Stories become useful lenses for us to interpret our surroundings, to make sense of the world and try and find meaning: much in the same way we try to with works of fiction in the first place.

There is a relentlessness about Ishaguro’s story. A foreboding sense that as night falls and the remains of the day fade, we will witness our protagonist’s end. That the ultimate transition we’re witnessing is from life to death. I know London will not be killed by the changes it is going through currently, but it may experience a certain type of death – one that kills it’s creativity, one that kills it’s vibrancy, one that makes it boring; a fate that could be worse than death.